NO, WE’RE NOT PUTTING

a third-generation Threadripper in this PC. Yet. We’ll get there, but right now the pricing is simply too steep to justify it; new sTRX4 motherboards are also monstrously expensive, so upgrading this system to the third gen would throw a comfortable thousand dollars or more on the overall price. Second-gen Threadrippers, such as the 2950X, are great value right now, so we just don’t think it’s worth the asking price yet.

Even without making that upgrade jump, the price of this build has still risen by over 100 bucks this month. A distinct lack of sales (and our insistence on keeping a Gen4 M.2 SSD for future upgrade potential) means there were few opportunities to make savings. We changed out the GPU for a comparable MSI model, and upgraded our motherboard to the Asus Prime X399-A.

Sticking with 32GB of RAM, we’ve gone back to G.Skill’s Sniper X memory at 3,600MT/s, ensuring we have great memory support for our Threadripper CPU. The last change we made was in service to M.2 Gen4; we want this build to be ready for a Threadripper 3960X, and that means ultra-fast SSD transfer speeds. To that end, we’ve replaced the XPG SSD with Gigabyte’s weighty Aorus SSD, as the XPG drive is no longer on sale. The Aorus SSD was one of the first Gen4 M.2 drives on the market, and its performance still holds up (even if the heatsink is a pain to remove).

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